A force-directed layout with a circular bounding box. This graph shows interactions between characters in the Les Miserables Stanford GraphBase dataset. The size of each node indicates the number of chapters the character appeared in.
A good force-directed layouts can be useful for understanding high-level network structure, identifying clusters and outliers, examining links that connect nodes, and following paths between nodes. However, when graphs are dense or very large, force-directed layouts can produce “hairball” visualizations that are difficult to read and understand.
Source for the parsed version of the data: https://github.com/rpgove/graphbase2json